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So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.

Graham Greene

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Graham Greene
Age: 86 †
Born: 1904
Born: October 2
Died: 1991
Died: April 3
Autobiographer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Berkhamsted
Hertfordshire
Henry Graham Greene
Firsts
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Invent
First
Word
Novelists
Writing
Story
Appears
Much
Lasts
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Novelist
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Takes
Depths

More quotes by Graham Greene

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The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.
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As the end of the what is called the 'sexual life' the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.
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You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other.
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American bankers believe in the personal touch the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter.
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One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
Graham Greene
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Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.
Graham Greene
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Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?
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Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.
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He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.
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Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.
Graham Greene
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The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.
Graham Greene
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He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.
Graham Greene
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Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?
Graham Greene
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I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.
Graham Greene
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There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.
Graham Greene
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It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
Graham Greene
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It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.
Graham Greene
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Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.
Graham Greene
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We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
Graham Greene
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They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.
Graham Greene